Hillquit, Morris (1869–1933)

A SOCIALIST WRITER and thinker, Morris Hillquit was significant in defining socialism and the labor movement in the United States. Born as Moses Hilkowitz in Riga, Latvia, then part of Russia, he immigrated to the United States in 1886 when he was 17. He settled on New York's Lower East Side, a hotbed of immigrant radicalism. By day he worked in the garment industry and by night he participated in political discussions in English, Russian, and Yiddish on the Cherry Street rooftops. His interest in left-wing politics and labor unionism led him to establish the United Hebrew Trades, a Jewish garment workers' union, and to work with the well-established Socialist Labor Party (SLP).

He entered New York University in 1891, graduated in two years, and in 1893 established what turned into a successful law practice. He changed his name officially in 1897. In 1899, Hillquit was leader of the conservative, constitutional socialists, the Kangaroos, against the radical and authoritarian Daniel DeLeon in the faction-ridden SLP. Unable to oust DeLeon, in 1901 Hillquit's Kangaroos combined with the Social Democratic Party to form the Socialist Party of America. Hillquit was the party's first national secretary. Although the leadership included the more prominent Eugene Debs and Victor Berger, Hillquit was the party's leading tactician and theorist, and he represented it on the executive committee of the Socialist and Labor International.

Hillquit's socialism was similar to the centrism of Germany's Karl Kautsky rather than that of Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin. Hillquit opposed the Industrial Workers of the World and wanted Bill Haywood expelled from the SP's executive committee. As an attorney, he defended unionists of all views, including Haywood. He was the first American socialist historian, producing The History of Socialism in the United States (1903) and Socialism in Theory and Practice (1909). He also wrote From Marx to Lenin (1923) after the socialists and communists split. Both Lenin and Leon Trotsky reacted and referred negatively to him, and Hillquit became anti-communist.

When the labor movement was defining its direction at the turn of the century, socialist unionists wanted unions to be the driving force in creating a more just and equitable society. Business unionists under the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its president, Samuel Gompers, believed that labor had to work within the capitalist system for narrow bread-and-butter goals. When, in 1903, socialist AFL members agitated for public ownership of the means of production and political action, Gompers said, “Economically, you are unsound; socially you are wrong; industrially you are an impossibility.” A decade later, in 1914, Gompers debated Hillquit about the goals of organized labor. The two spoke before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, which Congress established to investigate what was causing so much industrial strife in the United States. Hillquit pinned Gompers down to admitting that he had no goals other than perpetual improvement in a business-owned system. Hillquit and other socialists had a goal, a worker-controlled society in the near future.

Hillquit opposed the entry of the United States into World War I, and he defended many socialists charged with espionage. He also provided legal advice to labor unions. Twice his party nominated him for mayor of New York City. Hillquit ran for mayor of New York [Page 217]in 1917 and many of the East Siders volunteered for his campaign. His mayoral race brought him some 250,000 votes. Five times he ran for the U.S. Congress. He brought his socialists into the camp of Robert M. La Follette and the Progressives in 1924. His autobiography is titled Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (reprinted 1971). Hillquit died of tuberculosis in 1933.

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